’Duke Radford looked at him curiously, as if not understanding what he was talking about; then he said slowly:  “Oh yes, I like to see people, nice people; where do they come from?”

“England,” replied the young man.

The invalid shivered, then said more haltingly than before:  “I don’t like to think of England, it makes me sad; but Selincourt is a pretty name—­a very pretty name indeed!”

CHAPTER XV

Mr. Selincourt is Indiscreet

When Katherine reached home that night after doing the “backache portage” it seemed to be the last straw to her burden of endurance to be told that Mr. Selincourt had arrived.  The loss of the supper fish did not trouble her, for she and Phil had brought home a fine salmon, which they had taken from an Indian woman in exchange for a couple of small packets of hairpins, which in England might have fetched perhaps a halfpenny each, but in that remote district were priced at a quarter of a dollar.  It was the news of the arrival which upset her so badly.  She suffered tortures while she listened to Mrs. Burton’s eager talk about the Selincourts, of Mr. Selincourt’s kindly manner, and Miss Selincourt’s graceful charm.

“Hush, hush!” she kept saying.  “You will excite and worry Father with all this talk of new people.”

“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Burton replied.  “See how peaceful he is, and how little notice he takes of anything outside.  He will not remark any difference between Mr. Selincourt and Stee Jenkin, except that he may find the former more interesting to talk to.”

But Katherine shook her head, stealing many a glance at her father while she ate her supper, and worrying lest the name of the man he had wronged should stir some dim memory in his clouded mind, and bring up some ghost from the hidden past, to turn his peaceful days into a nightmare of unrest once more.  The salmon might have been sawdust for all the taste it had for her that night, and when supper was done she hurried through the work which could not be left, then, pleading weariness, went off to bed quite an hour before her usual time.

Although she went to bed she could not sleep.  She heard Jervis come in and stay talking to Mrs. Burton.  She also heard him say that he was going to take Mr. and Miss Selincourt across to Akimiski on the following day.  Then Jervis left, her father went with slow, faltering steps to his bed, and Nellie came in, but, thinking her sister asleep, moved softly and did not speak, for which Katherine was mutely grateful.

It was very early on the following morning when she saw the boat with Mr. Selincourt and Mary slipping down the river, rowed by some of the men who had brought them up from the lakes.  So it would be a day of respite, for the Selincourts would not be back until evening, too late to go visiting among their neighbours, and Katherine’s spirits rose immediately, because there was one more day to be happy in.